Upcoming Shaman ChangesFollow

/highfive :)

Edited, Oct 8th 2008 10:32pm by Sinstralis

lol it is funny the fist of fury set is only becoming good for shaman just before the new expansion comes out. now the agl on it will yield AP and with lava lash the off hand might not be so bad with flame tongue thrown on it even with its fast speed lol.

the fists did always look pretty awesome too bad blizzard made it for shaman and it worked better on fury warriors and rogues lol

I also heard that ghostwolf is being nerfed which would suck bigtime. In GW form I can gather herbs without changing and get around fairly fast, plus the quickcast has saved my butt on more then one occasion. I really really like my Shammy a LOT, even if I do get stomped in the BG (I just keep running back to the fight and have learned I'm better at staying put at a flag then raiding)cause it does take a lot of work to play it effectively in groups and I love soloing higher mobs then me and winning, plus I can usually take on a group of 3 my level with no problems (pardon my whining in my last post). All I want is for Blizz to make the money and time I spent and will spend worth it, so far so good but again, ya'll have me a little wary here and I'll be darned if I'll be a DeathKnight......

Are you kidding me? Shaman were the golden children of PVE in TBC, due to, in no particular order: totems, unleashed rage, chain heal, heroism rotations, mana tide, earth shield, ancestral healing, and probably one or 2 other things I'm forgetting at the moment. Honestly, shaman would commonly receive 5 raid invites to a 25man. What other class can claim that kind of representation?

And once again, we received more buffs than nerfs over the course of TBC. Damage reduction on shammy rage, MP5 on watershield, mana cost reduced for water/lightening shield, snare reduction on toughness, .5 secs off of GCD from totems, -1 sec cast time ghost wolf, AP--> spell damage, replacement of 2H spec with shamanistic focus, increased threat reduction on spirit weapons, reduced tick time on tremor totem, increased range on several totems, and dispel resist added to elemental shields (via resto talent) are all examples of buffs received (enhance especially got a lot of love).

What did we loose? Well, ele lost the ability to chain together EM/NS, there was the change of LB from 3-->2.5 sec base cast (nerf for ele, but arguably buff for resto), the fixing of the WF5/WF4 bug, and a couple of other things I can't immediately recall. Oh, and the indirect nerf to shaman via WFT, where yellow attacks, (particularly spamstring warriors) couldn't proc WF anymore.

Yes yes, we all know that shaman aren't the best in arena, particularly in 2v2 (slightly less so in 3v3), and that they are not as versatile in a wide variety of comps as, oh, say a rogue. It was still possible to do quite well however (war/pally/resto sham can do well in 3s, cleave comps in 5s for example). Remember however that 2s and 3s will pretty much always be "unbalanced"; even the devs say as much.

The beta developments look to be very promising on the whole in making a more dynamic style of play, while expanding our capabilities a bit. Once the numbers pass happens, I'm pretty sure that we'll be looking just fine.

In short, once again, no the sky is not falling as some may claim, and the class will be fine.

I can see that unless it starts raining pigs this is your opinion and you'll stick by it, so I won't waste everyone's time re-iterating previous points.

I will say that the number of buffs doesnt actually make much difference when Shamans were so deficient to begin with. To employ a crude analogy, if a guy was dying of thirst and drank more water than he would in good health, it doesnt mean he was always drinking water. The 'buffs' you mentioned were mostly fixes to oversights in the original development (anyone remember release Shamanistic Rage? God that sucked...). Number doesnt matter.

And in any case, since we are discussing post-Release period rather than the entire lifecycle of the expansion, you've essential disputed your own argument. Shamans received a sequence of buffs throughout TBC; why? If classes emerge from beta 'fine' then why were buffs deemed necessary post-Release? Shamans emerged from beta sadly lacking and required several fixes and buffs to bring them up to standard (remember Unleashed Rage causing threat...), therefore this time around it doesnt necessarily need to be different.

Incidentally Im not suggesting 'the sky is falling', I'm simply commenting on the shape of the clouds in it.

Blizzard wanted to make Rogues' CC more applicable, so they changed Sap to affect, basically, as they put it, "Anything with a skull." So yeah, there's really no reason to start fights (or wait for fights to start) in GW anymore.


Cumulonimbus, if I'm not mistaken.

Waitaminnit that's not rain!....

I've played about around a year and half, enh to 70, went to resto for gear in instances, then got some good ele gear from the raids to get ele crit up. About the same as most, farming for our gear as resto. As some has said in this post how weak we are, I can say we are very strong in all the bg, I top damage in every bg i do. But arenas are a different story all together, and this expac is not going to fix this problem.

PvE is fine, i'll prob have to go back to enh to get the most mana for my buck. But one thing for sure, there is no love from blizzard for shammys, I really think the DK class is the replacment for ours, They can bring so much to the table in plate. I've decided i'm going to level my shammy to 80 regardless of the devs no love toward my main, but i'm making a dk, and leveling up a couple of others. I really didn't want to level my low alts to play as a main, but i think there kinda forcing our hands if we really want to contend in arenas. All these new extras were getting are laughable compared to what all the other classes are getting.

Making totems raid wide is good, but you won't need more then 1 in the raid anymore, and since our dps is 30% less then most dps, we will be forced to heal yet again to get our gear, unless where guild loved in any spec.

Upcoming shaman changes, what changes?

One sad shammy

Any serious guild is going to want at least 2 shaman in any given raid, and maybe a third. Two will be wanted/needed just to provide all the basic totems to melee and to casters (talented and glyphed SoE and Stoneskin (probably talented), talented WF, Wrath of Air, Flametongue/Totem of Wrath, mana spring/Mana tide). I forsee most guilds running with at least an Enh and a Resto for 25 man raids. Ele will probably have a bit more work to do to justify their slot as things currently stand, since all they really bring to the table at the moment is ToW, Elemental Oath, and a potentially redundant heroism.

And once again, referencing parses of the beta where people are using exploits and bugged talents/abilities before the numbers pass is pointless. The devs have specifically stated that dps should be more normalized. If live hits and we're still seeing numbers that are way out of whack by the time we start hitting naxx, then I'll be pissed. For now though, I'm not too worried.



Edited, Oct 13th 2008 11:24am by TheJadeMonkey

If Monkey isnt worried then that's good for him, it really is. If he doesnt want to look at the current facts that's fine too, he is correct that the devs have promised a 'numbers pass' at some point. The thing I'd point out is that beta development is supposed to be an iterative process of trial and improvement, you should see a gradually shallowing curve towards the intended values. This current beta process shows us wild swings in concept, design and ability in every single build. Warlocks in particular seem to get a grab-bag of new weird talents every design pass, instead of refinements of those already proposed.

The numbers pass you're talking about better be a herculean effort in balancing because I have never seen an MMO balance the damage/healing/utility of every single class/spec (cos that's what is meant by 'numbers pass') in the time remaining to the WoW developers.

Just look at the video. It's going to take a massive effort just to bring those two classes back into line with each other. In order to keep to their stated design aim, they have to do that for every class and spec. In one month.

Not a bloody chance.

It's basically just an in-game DPS test on target dummies comparing a Moonkin and an Elemental Shaman. With roughly 500 less spell power and a non-optimal spec, the Moonkin completely blows the Elemental Shaman away.

Ok, I finally I finally got my internet at home working again so I could watch the video. Now, taking that video at face value does give concerns. However, if we actually stop to think about what is being shown, the only conclusion that can be reached is that the test is inherently flawed.

1. No information about the specs for any toons shown, other than the druid doesn't have eclipse.

2. Inconsistant buffs/debuffs on the toons and the target dummies. It would be a far better test if the toons had all buffs that would commonly be present in a raid environment, and the target dummy was fully debuffed for both toons. From what I remember, the shammy at the begining didn't appear to have any totems down. Also, if properly speced, the druid at the end would be getting the benefit of Earth and Moon while the shaman at the beginning wouldn't have.

3. I couldn't tell from the video quality, but were they attacking a skull level target dummy or something else?

4. The amount of time for these "dps tests" is on the short side for accuratly determining the damage.

5. Not using optimal spell rotations for either class means inaccurate results.

Now, I'm not saying that ele is fine because I still happen to think that there is not enough scaling talents to keep pace with other classes as gear improves. When I make a lvl 80 raiding build, I end up with ~5 points that will go into random locations or situational talents. A moonkin could conceivably take every single balance talent along with ~18 points in usefull resto talents if the points were avialable.

My prediction is that a talent for int/spirit-->spellpower will be created, or be tacked onto a current talent, and that should help to close the scaling gap a bit. I'd also like to see a +crit dam modifier to the nature school somewhere deep in ele, but that might be a pipe dream at this point.

Finally, to claim that we really "don't bring anything to the table except their dps or healing" is a bit false. The buff redundancy offered is also awefully nice and will prevent the loss of a key buff in case that idiot <insert class here> continues to stand in the fire and dies, thus depriving the rest of the raid of <insert buff here>.